Reform UK’s Richard Tice allegedly failed to pay £100,000 in corporation tax

The party's deputy leader says he will 'pay what is owed if numbers need rechecking' after more revelations from The Sunday Times

Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall Editor
Richard Tice failed to pay almost £100,000 in corporation tax, benefiting his investment company which made large donations to Reform UK.
The deputy leader of Nigel Farage's party ran four shell companies which did not pay any tax on profits between 2020 and 2022.
The entities existed purely to receive dividends from Tice's property investment firm and passed on the money — including the cash that tax specialists say is owed to HMRC — to their parent company.
Tisun Investments Ltd in turn transferred £1,113,000 to Reform between March 16, 2020, the date of the first dividend, and May 10, 2022, the date of the last. The payments, some gifts, others loans, made Tice one of the biggest donors in British politics at the time.
It is the first time his tax affairs can be directly linked to

the finances of the party.
The disclosures relate to the property investment company Tice founded, owned and ran as chief executive, called Quidnet REIT Ltd — which he still runs and owns today.
The Sunday Times has been investigating the complex and unusual structure of the company and its tax affairs over a number of weeks.
The total tax Tice's companies are known to have avoided through onshore and offshore entities, or failed to pay, in relation to Quidnet now amounts to almost £800,000.
Dan Neidle of Tax Policy
Associates said “The non-payment of tax leaves him and his network of firms vulnerable to investigation by HMRC, which could demand tax owed plus interest and potentially penalties.”
The revelations will be damaging for Tice, 61, a multimillionaire property developer who is Reform's spokesman for business, trade and energy. The Boston & Skegness MP has said his corporate experience and competence make him qualified for high office, previously telling The Sunday Times: “One of the things I am good at is making

money.”
He has dismissed all scrutiny of his affairs, describing a previous investigation by this newspaper into his “aggressive”, but apparently legal, tax avoidance as an attack on a “successful businessman”. He dismissed subsequent evidence he failed to pay tens of thousands in tax as a “technicality”.
On Saturday night, after declining to respond to our inquiries, Tice published a statement addressing his wider tax affairs. He said: “Naturally I am always happy to put things right and if numbers need rechecking, of course I will pay what is owed — be that more or less”. He accused The Sunday Times of unspecified “assumptions, numbers and dates” that were “incorrect”. He
said he would no longer be “indulging” the newspaper and claimed our reporting constituted part of a “smear campaign”. He did not dispute or challenge any specific part of our reporting.
The latest developments also pose questions for Farage, who turned to Tice to run and bankroll Reform between the 2019 and 2024 elections when he considered retiring. During the period in question, Tice served as either leader or chairman.
Farage defended Tice last week and was accused of “snapping” at a reporter who asked him to provide evidence for his deputy's claim that HMRC was not left out of pocket. The Reform leader would not do so and referred to the complexity of tax rules.
The latest disclosures relate to
four companies run by Tice and registered an address in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, all of which are required to file publicly available accounts. Tisun 1, Tisun 2 and Tisun 3, were formed on the same day in July 2018. Tisun 4 was created two years later. In official filings, all describe the “nature” of their business as that of a “dormant company”. Records suggest their sole role was to receive payments from Quidnet in which they held shares. Quidnet rents out eight nondescript industrial estates it owns from Newark and Northampton to Wigan. Its biggest premises is a 159,000 sq ft site in Darlington, once used by British Steel.
According to accounts he authorised and signed, Tice treated the payments received by Tisuns 1-4 as though they were ordinary dividends, which, when received by UK companies, are exempt from corporation tax. But they were, in tax terms, a special kind of dividend called a property income distribution or PID. These payments, composed of profits generated by rental income, are not tax-exempt in the way dividends are.
The accounts state that Tice wrote off the whole “expected” tax bill of each Tisun entity, leading to a bill of zero. According to the analysis of several professionals we consulted, he should have

instead taxed the payments, totalling £517,694, at the normal rate of corporation tax, then 19 per cent, leading to a bill of £98,362.
Tice offered two different explanations for why he did not pay tax on the profits when first asked by this newspaper some weeks ago.
One was that Tisun Investments, the parent group of Tisuns 1-4, made overall losses, meaning by law the subsidiaries did not need to pay tax. Tice said over WhatsApp: “[Tisun] had losses overall … so tax is paid/offset in the group.” He added that “the accountants will have applied the group taxation rules fully” and that any due tax would have been paid at “the group level”.
Neidle was one of several specialists who examined this argument. He, like the others, concluded it was not a viable theory: the parent group had not suffered the kind or scale of losses required for Tice to have written off the tax bill of each entity each year. In addition, there was no reference to parent losses in any of the relevant accounts, which, according to Neidle, there ordinarily would be if this applied.
The other reason Tice put forward is that “companies don't usually pay tax on divis [dividends] from other UK companies”. While this
Quidnet's property portfolio includes industrial estates in Northampton, pictured from the air, and Crawley

argument is not legally correct in the circumstances — these were taxable PIDs, not tax-free normal dividends — it does tally with the story presented in the accounts. These explicitly state that he paid no tax by attributing 100 per cent of profits to non-taxable “dividend income”. But they go further still.
The accounts can also be downloaded in a machine-readable format called iXBRL. This includes information invisible to the human eye, but “visible” to computers, for each piece of text. In this scenario, we can specifically see that Tice, or someone working for him, used accounting software to generate his accounts and reduced his tax bill by inserting his profits into a box marked “dividend income”. This generated an invisible tag referring to the “effect [of] dividends”. ​
​It is a criminal offence for a director to “recklessly” provide
false information on company accounts. Tice as sole director was responsible for submitting returns and filing accounts.
Over the years in which tax was not paid — 2020 to 2022 — Tisuns 1-4 passed their profits to Tisun Investments Ltd, which, via a holding company, Tisun Holdco Ltd, is owned by Tice. According to the Electoral Commission, during the same period, Tisun Investments loaned £1.113 million to Reform in 36 payments. Several of the loans (worth a combined £350,000) were converted into gifts years later.
Neidle said there was no ambiguity about the rate at which the payments to Tisuns 1-4 should have been taxed. He said: “This is a basic rule, not a grey area, and one widely understood across the industry.” He pointed to the fact that Tice himself had made the unusual decision to convert Quidnet into a

real-estate investment company, a tax-efficient legal status whose key feature is that profits are paid out as PIDs, not ordinary dividends. Quidnet even referred to “PIDs” in the company's accounts and stock market announcements.
Neidle said: “The fact the difference was missed repeatedly, across multiple companies and years, raises obvious questions.”
When Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, was revealed to have underpaid stamp duty on the purchase of a second home, Tice said she should resign if she had “any moral decency” and that her position was “morally completely indefensible”.
Tice, his lawyer and Reform did not respond to our inquiries. Several weeks ago Tice told us
that “no questions have been asked by HMRC so I trust them more than whoever is advising you”.
The story of Tice's complex tax affairs begins in September 2018. He was becoming increasingly involved in eurosceptic politics and would be appointed as chairman of the Brexit Party, the forerunner to Reform, founded by his friend Farage, within weeks.
Still, he had no intention of leaving the property world he had worked in since his twenties — and which had made him his first millions. He had particularly big ambitions for the company he had created a few years earlier.
On the face of it, Quidnet was an unglamorous collection of industrial estates and business parks in Newark, Northampton
and West Sussex. Its properties were worth £12 million, small fry compared with the investments he had managed firstly as chief executive of his grandfather's property group, which he ran from the age of 27, and later as chief executive of CLS Holdings Plc, a FTSE-250 listed company.
​​But Tice wanted to take Quidnet's activity to the next level. That September, having already taken the required first step of listing it on the Guernsey stock exchange, he applied for it to become a real-estate investment trust (REIT). REITs tend to manage billions of pounds of property — British Land Plc is one well-known example — and are designed to widen access to commercial property for retail investors. The company pays out profits on a regular basis, with shareholders, not the company itself, left to pay any resulting tax. As Tice himself reported in that year's accounts, the structure is “attractive for those seeking high income in a tax efficient manner”.
The status was not, however, designed for companies like his. His was not just a modestly sized firm, but, critically, one more or less wholly owned by him via a collection of mostly tax-efficient entities: an offshore trust, a pension investment trust, the newly created shell companies Tisuns 1, 2 and 3, and latterly Tisun 4. In fact, the rules actually

exclude companies like his from acquiring the status — they have to be owned by lots of people, or be “open”, not “close”, as the law defines it.
Yet Tice was able to benefit from a loophole. Quidnet had a three-year grace period — starting then, in September 2018, and ending in September 2021 — in which it could find new investors in order to meet the conditions for permanent existence as a REIT.
Tice did not use the time as intended. He never secured anything like the number of outside investors required. In fact there is no evidence he shared investor materials publicly and when we asked for a copy of such information, he declined, citing “confidentiality”. While Tice brought on board some colleagues as small shareholders, and an investor operating via the Channel Islands, he always owned more than 90 per cent of the company and so was forced to forfeit the status after two years and 11 months.
Yet in the meantime, his company enjoyed all the tax-perks of REIT status, and did not have to pay a penny in corporate tax on its profits. That amounted to a saving of £600,000. Tice's shareholder structure made him further savings. One requirement of REITs — even those in the “grace period” — is that they
Tice with Farage and other Reform members at the party conference in September
JACK HILL FOR THE TIMES

regularly shell out profits in payments to shareholders. Tice was, for all intents and purposes, the owner of the company but he did not own all of its shares personally. If he had, he would have paid income tax on any payments, but, instead, several of the entities that owned slices of the pie on his behalf were not required to pay any tax at all due to their status.
When The Sunday Times first revealed his unusual company structure last month, Neidle, the tax expert, said the arrangement looked “aggressive”.
Tice said there was no problem. He avoided tax, did not evade it, and had done nothing wrong, he claimed. To such criticism, Tice had a simple narrative. He said the story was a “smear”. He said Neidle, whose investigations have covered Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner as
well as Nadhim Zahawi, was biased in favour of Labour. He opened a Reform conference in Westminster on March 16 by selectively quoting from The Sunday Times's output the previous day and, when asked if Britons should avoid as much tax as legally possible, said “yes”.
The tenor of the conversation changed last Sunday, however, when this newspaper further reported that, for all the legitimate, and apparently legal, tax perks of its status, Quidnet had actually broken the law. One thing REITs are required to do is deduct a certain amount of tax before making payments to certain kinds of shareholders. But Tice did not do this. HMRC was left at least £91,000 out of pocket as some investors received payments that were far too large. This time, Tice described it as a “tax
technicality” and offered a political, rather than legal argument: he claimed that by overpaying himself, he had ended up paying more income tax, meaning the taxman eventually received the same sum anyway. When asked to give evidence of this, he refused. In addition, there is no legal way for a company to write off its tax bill simply because another party has paid more tax as a result of the company's previous non-payment.
The day after that story was published, Farage was asked about the failure and responded abruptly, telling a reporter to give him a “lecture” on the nature of REITs.
Today's disclosures reveal Tice repeatedly signed off accounts describing the payments made to Tisuns 1-4 as something specialists say they were not — ordinary dividends — when they could only have been PIDs, meaning tax should have been paid. Over several years, the accounts, which were personally signed off by the Reform deputy leader, include a line for the “expected” tax bill — the amount the company should have paid — followed by a section headed “dividend income”, which shows the profits for the previous year being deducted from the bill. By the following line, the “actual” tax bill is zero. Last week Tice refused to respond to analysis
indicating that, in fact, every penny should have been taxed at the normal rate of corporation tax.
To a layperson, accounts are difficult to comprehend and often include complex accounting jargon. But, thanks to a feature of modern accounting, we are able to confirm that Tice did indeed state that the tax could be written off as tax-free dividends. Since 2011, all UK companies have been required to submit accounts to Companies House, the UK's official government registrar of companies, in a format known as iXBRL, which means they can be read by a computer as well as humans. Such data is published and is available to the public.
The iXBRL files for the Tisun companies show that Tice, as director, completed his accounts using CCH, a piece of software run by Wolters Kluwer, a Dutch firm. It also lets us see exactly what steps Tice, or his accountant, took when using the software to generate certain sections. In particular, we can see that the Tisun entities filled in the tax section by reporting the amount of money received in property income distributions (PIDs) as dividends instead — and inserted the total payments received into a section called “dividend income”.
This human act led to the generation of an invisible tag —
Tax Increase Decrease From Effect Dividends From Companies — which means the tax bill has fallen because of the effect of dividends being taken into account. Adam Mohamed, of the Financial Reporting Council, confirms the code generated represents “the adjustment to the total tax charge caused by dividends received from companies being taxed at a different rate than the [normal] rate”.
​During the period in question, Tisuns 1-4 transferred their profits to their parent group, Tisun Investments Ltd. During the Brexit Party's transition to Reform UK, the limited company was one of Farage's largest funders, making several dozen loans worth more than £1 million and later converting them to the gifts.
Without the money, Reform would have been deprived of one of its biggest sources of income at a time when it was recovering from the 2019 general election, in which it ultimately agreed to stand down most candidates and was preparing to become a major force by the time of the next election.
For that, Farage has Tice to thank — and Tice, it seems, has even more questions to address.

technicality” and offered a political, rather than legal argument: he claimed that by overpaying himself, he had ended up paying more income tax, meaning the taxman eventually received the same sum anyway. When asked to give evidence of this, he refused. In addition, there is no legal way for a company to write off its tax bill simply because another party has paid more tax as a result of the company's previous non-payment.
The day after that story was published, Farage was asked about the failure and responded abruptly, telling a reporter to give him a “lecture” on the nature of REITs.
Today's disclosures reveal Tice repeatedly signed off accounts describing the payments made to Tisuns 1-4 as something specialists say they were not — ordinary dividends — when they could only have been PIDs, meaning tax should have been paid. Over several years, the accounts, which were personally signed off by the Reform deputy leader, include a line for the “expected” tax bill — the amount the company should have paid — followed by a section headed “dividend income”, which shows the profits for the previous year being deducted from the bill. By the following line, the “actual” tax bill is zero. Last week Tice refused to respond to analysis
indicating that, in fact, every penny should have been taxed at the normal rate of corporation tax.
To a layperson, accounts are difficult to comprehend and often include complex accounting jargon. But, thanks to a feature of modern accounting, we are able to confirm that Tice did indeed state that the tax could be written off as tax-free dividends. Since 2011, all UK companies have been required to submit accounts to Companies House, the UK's official government registrar of companies, in a format known as iXBRL, which means they can be read by a computer as well as humans. Such data is published and is available to the public.
The iXBRL files for the Tisun companies show that Tice, as director, completed his accounts using CCH, a piece of software run by Wolters Kluwer, a Dutch firm. It also lets us see exactly what steps Tice, or his accountant, took when using the software to generate certain sections. In particular, we can see that the Tisun entities filled in the tax section by reporting the amount of money received in property income distributions (PIDs) as dividends instead — and inserted the total payments received into a section called “dividend income”.
This human act led to the generation of an invisible tag —
Tax Increase Decrease From Effect Dividends From Companies — which means the tax bill has fallen because of the effect of dividends being taken into account. Adam Mohamed, of the Financial Reporting Council, confirms the code generated represents “the adjustment to the total tax charge caused by dividends received from companies being taxed at a different rate than the [normal] rate”.
​During the period in question, Tisuns 1-4 transferred their profits to their parent group, Tisun Investments Ltd. During the Brexit Party's transition to Reform UK, the limited company was one of Farage's largest funders, making several dozen loans worth more than £1 million and later converting them to the gifts.
Without the money, Reform would have been deprived of one of its biggest sources of income at a time when it was recovering from the 2019 general election, in which it ultimately agreed to stand down most candidates and was preparing to become a major force by the time of the next election.
For that, Farage has Tice to thank — and Tice, it seems, has even more questions to address.

So, Mr Tice wiggles out of paying tax, then" aggressively attacks" the publication which exposed this.
Who would have thought it of him, one wonders?
Well, I would have thought it of him..

Maybee70 - it certainly seems to be a complicated and unusual tax vehicle.

I wonder why Tice doesn't simply, open himself to an investigation voluntarily. Or seek specialist tax advice on the matter and publish that as did AR. He admits he may have made an error and may have underpaid on his tax after all.

At the moment, as a Reform Deputy Leader, he's just coming across as hypocritical. It also undermines the Reform UK party that he's not willing to be transparent and abide by the same rules Reform applies to other political parties over underpaid tax allegations. It remains an allegation till it's proven either way, which is not a good look....

I wonder how much coverage this will get in the rest of the media🤔

Not holding my breath😡

Brilliant analysis of Tice’s REIT dabbling by Dan Neidle.

taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/04/18/richard-tice-quidnet-reit-corporation-tax/

Important to note that Neidle says this is neither tax avoidance nor tax evasion. It is error.

But it points to what is so fundamental about Reform and comes up again and again. They are very bad at anything to do with numbers and why their policies never add up.

It was very clear when the Telegraph questioned Tice last May about the promised income tax cuts that Reform had walked back on, he spoke as if he was going to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.

When Farage announced his “shady” cabinet, the post went to Jenrick. Maybe someone has noticed how careless Tice is - not unlike a certain Tory defector to Reform and former CoE called Zahawi whose careless tax error amounted to £3.7 million, almost £5 million after interest and penalites were added.

Mr Jenrick has been posting pictures of repaired roads near him, celebrating them, and expressing dismay at how badly they had been neglected over the last decade ...
whilst he was in government..

Well if he wants Reform to get into Government- hopefully Jenrick and indeed Nadhim Zahawi can share their government wisdom and experience with F and Tice- who have never had such high office experience- ever.

Nadhim Zahawi was in a similar situation to the one Tice now finds himself in when he was the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer no less. He was made subject to an enquiry/investigation by the PM's (Rishi Sunak) ethics advisor. Outcome a serious breach of the ministerial code, he was sacked and NZ issued an 'apology' for not "being more explicit" and he had made a "none deliberate, careless mistake".

He settled a payment of £5 million pounds with HMRC for his "careless error"

Farage as a party leader is no comparison to Rishi Sunak when it comes to ethics and transparency or standards of behaviour he expects from his party members.

This reminds me of the Camilla Tominey show on GB News this morning. There was a Labour MP who I had never heard of and he was invited on to discuss the current PM affair.

Within seconds he refused to talk about KS even though CT politely pointed out several times that this was what they were discussing. He got really stroppy and tried to turn it round to discussing Richard Tice. He started loudly talking over her and would not stop. She was getting exasperated with him and told him several times that as it was currently a legal matter they should not discuss it but she did point out that last time HMRC investigated RT they discovered he had OVERPAID his taxes and they issued a refund.

Primrose53 14.07 "This reminds me of the Camilla Tominey show on GB News this morning. There was a Labour MP who I had never heard of and he was invited on to discuss the current PM affair.

Within seconds he refused to talk about KS even though CT politely pointed out several times that this was what they were discussing. He got really stroppy and tried to turn it round to discussing Richard Tice. He started loudly talking over her and would not stop. She was getting exasperated with him and told him several times that as it was currently a legal matter they should not discuss it but she did point out that last time HMRC investigated RT they discovered he had OVERPAID his taxes and they issued a refund"

I didn't see that. But if it's any consolation Jenrick, did exactly the same on BBC Laura Kuensberg programme this morning- wanting to focus on KS instead and kept talking over LK or not answering her question. It's what politicians do 🥱 habitually. LK did remain impartial however, as you would expect from the BBC and she not providing any personal views or make positive inference statements on any contributors.

But you say Camilla Tominey stated Tice had been previously investigated and found to have overpaid his tax and issued with a refund? I can find no information whatsoever that he was ever made subject to an HMRC investigation- or for what reason- when was that? did she say that do you think to sway viewers positively towards TICE because of a Reform bias?

TICE makes annual tax returns as do I. you make backwards payment each year for tax due on earnings but then a forward tax payment in July each year calculated on your earnings from the previous year. As earnings change year to year HMRC calculates balancing payments- when income then rises or reduces on next tax return. a refund is made or the next payment increased accordingly. Usual and frequent. Such refunds not as a result of an "Investigation" into allegations of underpaid tax whcih from what you say CT was inferring. Ie Bias towards Tice/Reform and circumstances, details, dates and amounts not made clear. The BBC would not be allowed to get away with that if that is what CT did. But then GB news does perform very poorly in factual reporting and bias metrics. Hopefully the new Ofcom head might address this issue with GB news in due course.

Did CT provide any information about Ticeis previous "tax investigation" Primorse53 or are you aware of any detail?

I have little patience with any politician who is invited to discuss one thing and tries to distract with another but with respect, Primrose, this thread is about Tice’s tax affairs so what has Tominey’s wish to discuss the Mandelson case got to do with it?

Tice’s tax affairs are in the public domain because there are published accounts for Quidnet and associated companies which are there for anyone to see.

Gabriel Pogrund and Dan Neidle have exposed large tax underpayments that HMRC will now pursue.

Whether Tice overpaid tax in the past is irrelevant. Anyone may have overpaid tax in the past but it doesn’t excuse mistakes made in subsequent years.

Tice … used his Quidnet property company’s REIT status to save tax. That meant Quidnet itself paid no corporation tax on its property business – but the quid pro quo was that its corporate shareholders had to pay tax on the dividends they received. They did not. Instead, Mr Tice signed accounts wrongly claiming that the dividends – £514,000 in total – were tax exempt. The result: they failed to pay £98,000 of corporation tax.

This is a different issue from our previous report, which found that Quidnet REIT failed to withhold about £120,000 of tax on distributions to Mr Tice and his offshore trust. But it arises from the same underlying mistake: claiming the tax benefits of a REIT but ignoring the tax liabilities. (Source:Tax Policy Associates.

And this is where politicians, in their zeal to discredit others, find that people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, especially when there are highly skilled investigative journalists and razor-sharp tax experts looking for something to get their teeth into.

The media outlets covering the allegations today that Tice has underpaid tax of over £100k:

The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian, BBC News, Sky News, The Mirror, Channel 4 news, Yahoo news, and many regional news sites eg Manchester Evening News.

Notable media outlets choosing NOT to provide any coverage about the allegations against TICE: GB News, the DM and The Telegraph.

I watched the 12 minute video of CT interviewing MP Tom Hughes on GB news this morning Primrose. TH was more quietly spoken- did answer CT's questions about KS ( though not to her liking), did not raise his voice shrilly or as loudly as did CT, she spoke for longer periods yet was supposed to be the interviewer and he the interviewee, he couldn't get a word in serval times and he quietly said on several occasions that GB should also be covering the story about the allegations about Tice ( ie as GB news is about Starmer. CT did not like that That seemed to incense CT as GB news clearly has decided- for obvious reasons- her employer, GB news is biased towards Reform UK, is not an impartial media outlet and no doubt had briefed its presenters of the day it had chosen not to cover the story.

That's the problem- one rule and lack of transparency for Reform UK and allegations about Tice underpaid tax allegations and another rule Reform UK and GB news applies to other parties and other politicians. TICE'S tax allegations merit investigation and transparency.

And as we have temporarily jumped Threads to the topic of security vetting. Is it true that Johnson failed his vetting, but still was appointed by May?